Six weeks into a year-long “dream job,” a contract with the University of Florida to study monkeys along the upper Amazon in Suriname, newly minted primatologist Andrew Westoll fell out of love with science.

“I grew tired very quickly of reducing everything I was experiencing and seeing into quantifiable data and Latin names,” the 34-year-old Toronto writer said recently during an interview near the Cabbagetown home he shares with his wife and their Wheaten Terrier.

“I really just wanted to tell stories.”

But he lacked the necessary chops, he said, and immediately after his return from the wilds of Suriname, Westoll set out to overcome that handicap by nailing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

He returned to Suriname 5 years later as a writer, not as a scientist, ostensibly searching for a rare species of frog, but also engaging himself in a mysterious dance with inhabitants of every corner of that little known country’s landscape, and producing The Riverbones, a much lauded account of the tragic struggle between human rights, ecological preservation and economic need.

Now, with his second book, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, in the running for this year’s prestigious Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction — the winner of the $25,000 purse will be announced Monday — he has proof that his sudden career switch was both wise and timely.

“I’d done some scribbling in my free time, and science will always be there for me — it runs in my family — but this is where I’ve been heading for a long time, exploring the line between activism and journalism,” he said.

Westoll’s gut-wrenching chronicle of his 10-week stay in a rehabilitation centre in rural Quebec among 13 physically and psychologically abused chimpanzees — the victims of medical and cosmetic industry testing, science and space program experiments, as well as discarded pets and circus animals — is shortlisted for the prestigious award alongside Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, by Wade Davis; Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, by Charlotte Gill; The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit, by JJ Lee; and Afflictions & Departures: Essays, by Madeline Sonik.

Westoll is the only contender who’s not a resident of B.C., a circumstance, he noted, that says a great deal about the popularity among readers of creative non-fiction in Canada’s West.

And given the growth of this particular genre — Westoll equates it with the recent boom in point-of-view documentaries — he’s surprised that no other writer had approached Gloria Grow, founder and operator of the Fauna Sanctuary, since he first thought of writing about her groundbreaking rehab work in his early 20s.

During a phone conversation with her to set up a piece he’d been commissioned to write about one of the rehab chimps for The Walrus, he said, “We both seemed to know this would become a much larger project.”

Access was conditional on Westoll’s taking an active part as one of the sanctuary’s workers, feeding, interacting with the animals, cleaning the facility.

“Just hanging around and observing would not have been comfortable for Gloria, and immersion was the only way I could effectively enter this new world,” explained Westoll, who lived in a basement apartment beneath the chimp house, where he’d compile and transcribe his notes every night.

He was soon able to recognize each animal’s unique and startlingly different character traits, behavioural tics, gestures and language, some of which can be seen on the author’s web site.

“In the end, this was the chimpanzees’ home, and I had to make it clear I was there to help them,” he said. “That was crucial.”

And as closely as Westoll observed the chimps, occasionally prone to murderous rages, they were watching him — “All the time,” he said.

“They’re such curious and intelligent creatures, and like humans, they learn by watching. Unlike other animals, they can cross over into our world and engage.

“I already knew intellectually that chimps are individuals with personalities and moods, but to watch it play out at close quarters was quite a revelation. They meet us half way . . . they appear as fascinated by us as we are by them.”

The closeness he felt with the animals was a life changing event, Westoll said.

“I was never an activist, but while I was living with these very traumatized chimpanzees, I found my activist bone. I never realized till now that stories can move people to act. I knew it emotionally, but as a practising story teller I’m suddenly aware of the power I have to change things.

“After decades of unimaginably painful biomedical research with chimps, and immense suffering, practically nothing has come of it, nothing we could say was beneficial to human life. This science was a bust.

“What happened to these chimps and others like them is a huge story, and my book is just a small part of it. All I can do is try to get it into the hands of as many people as I can.”

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.